About Robert Lazzarini

In his unsettling sculptures of distorted objects—including guns, street signs, and windows—Robert Lazzarini pursues his fascination with the way in which such well-worn and common things can become imbued with stories, serving as stand-ins for much larger narratives and the people who use them. Inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark and focused on a distinctly American narrative, he constructs his sculptures out of the same materials as their real world counterparts. For Lazzarini, the history of the object, indicated by the marks of time and wear, relates directly to the people who used it, sometimes violently, others casually. As he explains: “A concern of mine has always been the idea of the historicity of the object. Thinking about the object not as this new or ideal thing but as something that’s lived in the world and has been affected.”